Passionately watching cozy British competition shows with my lovely wife is such an engaging pastime that we have been forced to circle round and start watching them all over again. We are currently on our second go-round with the OG of the genre: The Great British Baking Show. I usually can't remember for sure who wins any given season, but I do seem to remember enough on the second watch that it takes out some of the worse tension of the viewing.
Oh yes, there is plenty of tension in British competition shows, sometimes a little too much. So... they are even cozier the second time around! I like everybody better now that I don't need to worry so much about any particular person winning or losing. Everyone is getting a second chance here.
But boy, this show sure does make me hungry. Or not hungry, exactly, it makes me want to make and eat elaborate baked sweets all day long. Unfortunately, eating rich, sweet baked confections all day long is likely not terribly good for me. In fact, it is probably healthiest for me to eat them... never. And though I'd like to say that this is the kind of thing I could perhaps compromise on, it doesn't really work like that.
And nothing, no ingredient gets me going quite like (as happens surprisingly often) when someone uses passionfruit.
Oh passionfruit!
I don't think I even encountered a real live passionfruit more than about 15 years ago. And it was also about that time I encountered some passionfruit pastry of the most extraordinary kind at a French bakery in Edina.
Do you know what the main street of Edina is?
France Avenue.
So of course they had a fabulous passionfruit patisserie.
But does this all mean I hadn't encountered the flavor of passionfruit until I was in my forties?
No. Let us return to my childhood and one of my all-time favorite sickening indulgences of my preteens: Hawaiian Punch Red.
This was a hideously sweet commercial fruit punch drink. Its main flavor was passionfruit. And I only liked it one way: When it came in a mix-with-water sugar flavor mix in a tin, and a person could use far more than the appropriate amount when making a drink. The best part was when one drank the increasingly strong liquid and got to a kind of syrupy passionfruit flavored sugar slurry at the bottom. It was passionfruit heaven, though I didn't know it was passionfruit at the time...
Nor how close I must have been to instant diabetes.
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